FACES FROM VIDEO

The exhibition features ten aspiring students from fine arts academies in Bratislava, Ústí nad Labem, and Plzeň. All are studying in multi-media ateliers and have yet to devote themselves to a signature style or particular medium with which they have worked exclusively over an extended period of time. For example, their work in video has produced a great deal of contingent, targeted or aimless footage, which in fairly automatic and simple post-production work has yielded the pictures which thematically inspired this exhibit. The installation presents a selection of short videos, which combine motifs of the human figure, face, and its spontaneous, confidential depiction. All videos are characterized by an uncomplicated communicativeness as well as a certain absence of form, since the medium chosen here, video, serves more of an auxiliary function. The camera loosely records the personal performances or dialogues, as a photograph captures its subject. The moving pictures here have minimal movement without a sequenced structure, like a condensation of filmed shots – a number of shorts shots in series – or are entirely unedited. The pictures cannot easily be placed in a genre. They range at times from amateur photography, to documentary work, reproductions, portraits, or auto-portraits. Since the principles of film production are somewhat subordinate here to the static picture, an important central addition to this exhibit is the kinetic object of Lukáš Kellner. Swing is a nostalgic work effectively heightening our perception. When we are seated and moving back and forth through the space, we are led to an artificial state similar to hallucination or the watching of an actual film.